Senior Advocate, Rickey Tarfa, Lied About His Real Age

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has revealed that Mr. Rickey Tarfa, SAN, falsified his age, urging Justice Mohammed Idris of a Federal High Court in Lagos not to allow a further and better affidavit filed by the Senior Advocate of Nigeria in support of his N2.5bn suit against the EFCC.

“He who comes to equity must come with clean hands,” lawyer for the EFCC, Mr. Wahab Shittu, insisted on Monday while moving a counter-affidavit to Tarfa’s application seeking to tender a better and further affidavit to support his case.

An EFCC operative, Moses Awolusi, claimed in a counter-affidavit, that though Tarfa gave his age as 43 in the statement he made to EFCC on the day of his arrest, findings showed that Tarfa’s real age is 54.

“I know as a fact that the applicant, in his extrajudicial statement to the 1st respondent upon his arrest, falsely stated that his age was 43 years in the document marked Exhibit 1 to the counter-affidavit of the 1st respondent dated 18th February, 2016, whereas the true age of the applicant, as stated in the compendium published for all Senior Advocates of Nigeria referred to, is 54 years old,” Awolusi averred.

But Tarfa’s lawyer, Chief Bolaji Ayorinde (SAN), urged Justice Idris to discountenance the EFCC’s claim, saying that anyone could misrepresent his age under the kind of treatment that the EFCC subjected Tarfa to on February 5.

“In such a situation, I would put my age at 25 because I will be under shock,” Ayorinde said.

But the EFCC’s lawyer, Shittu, described Tarfa’s application as an abuse of court processes and a ploy to arrest the judgment of the court, which was earlier slated for delivery on Monday.

Shittu, who claimed that Tarfa had already admitted paying N225,000 to the judge and had also lied to the EFCC about his age, said the SAN did not deserve the discretionary favour of the court.

- The battle between the SAN and EFCC is getting interesting.